Text mode programs are program which output is only made
out of text (surprise!). In Windows terminology, they are
called CUI (Console User Interface) executables, by opposition
to GUI (Graphical User Interface) executables. Win32 API
provide a complete set of APIs to handle this situation, which
goes from basic features like text printing, up to high level
functionalities (like full screen editing, color support,
cursor motion, mouse support), going through features like
line editing or raw/cooked input stream support

Given the wide scope of features above, and the current usage
in Un*x world, Wine comes out with three different ways for
running a console program (aka a CUI executable):

bare streams

wineconsole with user backend

wineconsole with curses backend

The names here are a bit obscure. "bare streams" means
that no extra support of Wine is provided to map between the
Unix console access and Windows console access. The two other
ways require the use of a specific Wine program
(wineconsole)
which provide extended facilities. The following table
describes what you can do (and cannot do) with those three
ways.

Table 3-1. Basic differences in consoles

Function

Bare streams

Wineconsole with user backend

Wineconsole with curses backend

How to run (assuming executable is called foo.exe)

$ wine foo.exe

$ wineconsole -- --backend=user foo.exe

$ wineconsole foo.exe

You can also use --backend=curses as an option

Good support for line oriented CUI applications
(which print information line after line)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Good support for full screen CUI
applications (including but not limited to color
support, mouse support...)

When wineconsole is used, several configuration options are
available. Wine (as Windowses do) stores, on a per application
basis, several options in the registry. This let a user, for
example, define the default screen-buffer size he would like
to have for a given application.

As of today, only the user backend allows you to edit those
options (we don't recommend editing by hand the registry
contents). This edition is fired when a user right clicks in
the console (this popups a menu), where you can either
choose from:

Default: this will edit the settings shared by all
applications which haven't been configured yet. So,
when an application is first run (on your machine,
under your account) in wineconsole,
it will inherit these default settings.
Afterwards, the application will have its
own settings, that you'll be able to modify at your will.

Properties: this will edit the application's
settings. When you're done, with the edition, you'll
be prompted whether you want to:

Keep these modified settings only for this
session (next time you run the application, you
will not see the modification you've just made).

Use the settings for this session and save them
as well, so that next you run your application,
you'll use these new settings again.

Here's the list of the items you can configure, and their
meanings:

Table 3-2. Wineconsole configuration options

Configuration option

Meaning

Cursor size

Defines the size of the cursor. Three options are
available: small (33% of character height), medium
(66%) and large (100%)

Popup menu

It's been said earlier that wineconsole
configuration popup was triggered using a right
click in the console's window. However, this can
be an issue when the application you run inside
wineconsole expects the right click events to be
sent to it. By ticking Control or
Shift you select
additional modifiers on the right click for
opening the popup. For example, ticking Shift will
send events to the application when you right
click the window without Shift being hold down,
and open the window when you right-click while
Shift being hold down.

Quick edit

This tick box lets you decide whether left-click
mouse events shall be interpreted as events to be
sent to the underlying application (tick off) or
as a selection of rectangular part of the screen
to be later on copied onto the clipboard (tick on).

History

This lets you pick up how many commands you want
the console to recall. You can also drive whether
you want, when entering several times the same
command - potentially intertwined with others -
whether you want to store all of them (tick off)
or only the last one (tick on).

Police

The Police property sheet allows you to pick the
default font for the console (font file, size,
background and foreground color).

Screenbuffer & window size

The console as you see it is made of two different
parts. On one hand there's the screenbuffer which
contains all the information your application puts
on the screen, and the window which displays a
given area of this screen buffer. Note that the
window is always smaller or of the same size than
the screen buffer. Having a strictly smaller window
size will put on scrollbars on the window so that
you can see the whole screenbuffer content.

Close on exit

If it's ticked, then wineconsole will exit
when the application within terminates. Otherwise,
it'll remain opened until the user manually closes
it: this allows seeing the latest information of a
program after it has terminated.

Edition mode

When the user enter commands, he or she can
choose between several edition modes:

Emacs: the same keybindings as under
emacs are available. For example,
Ctrl-A
will bring the cursor to the beginning
of the edition line. See your emacs
manual for the details of the commands.

Win32: these are the standard Windows
console key-bindings (mainly using
arrows).